Explaining Extremity in Evaluation of Group Members: Meta-Analytic Tests of Three Theories. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • A meta-analysis that included more than 1,100 effect sizes tested the predictions of three theoretical perspectives that explain evaluative extremity in social judgment: complexity-extremity theory, subjective group dynamics model, and expectancy-violation theory. The work seeks to understand the ways in which group-based information interacts with person-based information to influence extremity in evaluations. Together, these three theories point to the valence of person-based information, group membership of the evaluated targets relative to the evaluator, status of the evaluators' ingroup, norm consistency of the person-based information, and incongruency of person-based information with stereotype-based expectations as moderators. Considerable support, but some limiting conditions, were found for each theoretical perspective. Implications of the results are discussed.

published proceedings

  • Pers Soc Psychol Rev

altmetric score

  • 1

author list (cited authors)

  • Bettencourt, B. A., Manning, M., Molix, L., Schlegel, R., Eidelman, S., & Biernat, M

citation count

  • 19

complete list of authors

  • Bettencourt, B Ann||Manning, Mark||Molix, Lisa||Schlegel, Rebecca||Eidelman, Scott||Biernat, Monica

publication date

  • February 2016